Sinn Fein leader denies IRA man was a Nazi collaborator.

 

Sinn Fein leader - Mary Lou McDonald

Did the IRA seriously believe that if Hitler and the Nazis had won WWII, he would have given them an independent Ireland?

The policy was one of Britain's difficulties are Ireland's opportunities. This led to some people like the IRA Chief of Staff, Sean Russell, collaborating with the Nazis. Although Russell trained with the Abwehr in Germany and died on a German submarine off the coast of Ireland in August 1940, (Operation Dove), Mary Lou McDonald, the President of Sinn Fein, denied that he was a Nazi collaborator. In May 2020, she said that Russell was a "militarist" and not a Nazi collaborator, despite his links with the Nazis. In 2003, she spoke at a commemoration event for Sean Russell.

The IRA man, Frank Ryan, was also involved with the Nazis, but I suspect that he was less enthusiastic about his involvement with the Nazis. He died in Dresden in 1944, of pleurisy and pneumonia. He'd been handed to the Germans as a prisoner, after fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

When Hitler died, the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon da Valera, sent condolences to the German government. Had Hitler won the war, I suspect that IRA men like Russell, would have been sent to the concentration camps and Ireland would have been put under the control of some Nazi sympathiser, like Oswald Moseley, or Lord Haw-Haw, the Irish American, William Joyce.

Following criticism, I believe that Mary Lou McDonald, admitted that Russell's involvement with the Nazis was "misguided."